The Dutch Individualised Care Scale for patients and nurses - a psychometric validation study

Translating and psychometrically assessing the Individualised Care Scale (ICS) for patients and nurses for the Flemish and Dutch healthcare context.

Individualised care interventions have positive effects on health outcomes. However, there are no valid and reliable instruments for evaluating individualised care for the Flemish and Dutch healthcare context.

Psychometric validation study.

In Flemish hospitals, data were collected between February and June 2016, and in Dutch hospitals, data were collected between December 2014 and May 2015. Nurses with direct patient contact and a working experience of minimum 6 months on the wards could participate. Patient inclusion criteria were being an adult, being mentally competent, having an expected hospital stay of minimum 1 day, and being able to speak and read the Dutch language. In total, 845 patients and 569 nurses were included.

The ICS was translated into Dutch using a forward-backward translation process. Minimal linguistic adaptations to the Dutch ICS were made to use the scale as a Flemish equivalent. Omega, Cronbach's Alpha, mean inter-item correlations and standardised subscale correlations established the reliability and confirmatory factor analysis the construct validity of the ICS.

Internal consistency using Omega (Cronbach's Alpha) ranged from 0.83 to 0.96 (0.82-0.95) for the ICS-Nurse and from 0.88 to 0.96 (0.87-0.96) for the ICS-Patient. Fit indices of the confirmatory factor analysis indicated a good model fit, except for the root mean square error of approximation, which indicated only moderate model fit.

The Dutch version of the ICS showed acceptable psychometric performance, supporting its use for the Dutch and Flemish healthcare context.

Knowledge of nurses' and patients' perceptions on individualised care will aid to target areas in the Dutch and Flemish healthcare context in which work needs to be undertaken to provide individualised nursing care.